User blog:Infantisland/Wall Street Journal 1999
You should be as crazy as the people who make Crazy Bones. The popcorn-size plastic figures, mostly used as pieces in their own games, are fast becoming a fad in the cities where they are sold. "From a sales standpoint right now, Crazy Bones rank above Beanie Babies," says Sue Hoffman, a manager at a Zany Brainy toy store in Newtown, Pa. The Crazy Bones family comprises 60 goofy-faced characters, with such names as Bone Jour, James Bone, Airbone and Eggy. At first glance they don't even look like toys. Packaged as sets of four in colorful wrappers, Crazy Bones can easily be mistaken for candy. It's catching on without national promotion. Instead, Toy Craze, Crazy Bones' U.S. distributor, is relying on a well-orchestrated grass-roots marketing team that introduces kids -- mostly boys -- to the toy at Boy Scout meetings, after-school programs and church youth groups. "We like to call it in-your-face marketing, and we mean that quite literally," says Scott Harris, chief executive of Toy Craze, a closely held Cleveland concern. The approach has turned Crazy Bones into the boy's toy of the moment in Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York and other cities, where it largely sells outside the mass-merchant retailing mainstream. Toy Craze is planning to take its marketing machine to Miami, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere this year. A packet of four figures costs $2. Accessories, including something called a "coffin" to carry the Crazy Bones in, sell for about the same price. Zany Brainy's Ms. Hoffman says children visit the Newtown store after school "with their little bags of saved-up change." =Big Crowd = Last month, the store hosted an afternoon event at which kids could view each other's Crazy Bones collections and swap pieces. More than 7,000 youths came to buy, trade and watch game demonstrations. Crazy Bones has its roots in ancient Greece, where children collected the knuckle bones of sheep, painted pictures on them and used them for games resembling today's marbles and jacks. Jose Maria Bella, a Spanish toy inventor, adapted the idea, using injection-molded plastic instead of bone, after his children became tickled with the idea during a visit to a museum a few years ago. Spain's Magic Box International introduced Crazy Bones in Europe in 1996, where they were sold under the name GoGo's. In the 30 months following that debut, the figures garnered $300 million in European sales. Toy Craze bought U.S. merchandising rights to Crazy Bones from Magic Box in 1997. Unable to afford a national TV campaign, the distributor found Crazy Bones made little impression on chains such as Toys "R" Us Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. So Toy Craze concentrated on mom and pop outlets and such specialty stores as Zany Brainy Inc. and Noodle Kidoodle Inc. Last year, Toy Craze sold $3.5 million of Crazy Bones, below the $15 million it had projected. But it is counting on the new markets to help boost 1999 sales to at least $6 million. In Europe, vendors sold the toys on school grounds, which Toy Craze tried in the U.S. until it found many schools didn't allow salespeople to approach students on school property. "We were chased off campus when we tried to do that," Mr. Harris says. "It was as if we were trying to give away cigarettes to kids." Toy Craze's marketing team -- four full-time employees and about 20 part-timers -- turned to other avenues. After arriving in a city, team members try to meet with officials of schools and youth groups to describe Crazy Bones, which is portrayed as an inexpensive and educational alternative to video games and TV. Then the team often gets to sit down with a group of kids to talk about the toy. ='Only on Weekends' = Peter Gantner, a Toy Craze principal and marketing team leader, says the grass-roots marketing "is very labor intensive. I get to see my family in Phoenix only on weekends." But Mr. Gantner, who used a similar marketing plan at another company to promote Pogs three years ago, hopes Crazy Bones will meet with similar success. Pogs brought in $17 million in sales. Like Pogs, Crazy Bones is what the industry refers to as an "adrenaline toy" -- one that lends itself to competitions in which winners take the losers' playthings. Losers often buy more to replenish their stock. But because of its gambling overtones, Pogs ended up being banned from many schools, and Toy Craze doesn't like to play up the gambling aspect of Crazy Bones. To play Crazy Bones, kids line up their figures about 6 feet apart from their opponents. They then take turns throwing one of their own Crazy Bones at the other player's line, either keeping the figures they hit or just scoring points with each hit, depending on the rules. Many kids find the riskier version more fun. "To me playing for keeps is the most exciting part about Crazy Bones," says Jared Weintraub, a nine-year-old fourth grader from Mt. Kisco, N.Y, who admits losing a few friends by playing the game that way. One time, he recalls, a neighbor "who is a real good friend of mine got mad and I had to give him back his Crazy Bones to save our friendship." Ten-year-old Adam Toltzis, a Yardley, Pa., fifth grader who prides himself for winning nearly 100 of his 215 piece Crazy Bones collection in head-to-head games, says he spends hours honing his aim by placing his Crazy Bones on his stomach and "flicking them straight across the room with my finger." The trick, he says, is to use your favorite piece as your shooter. "You can never lose your shooter and just that thought makes you feel real loose and relaxed when you aim," Adam says. One of the challenges Crazy Bones collectors face is finding the pieces they want. Since they come in opaque packs, there is no way to tell whether the pieces needed to complete a collection are included. Some kids, like Andy Kascik, 11, from Alpharetta, Ga., try to guess what's in a package by feeling the pieces inside -- but the shapes are similar. "I have all these doubles," Andy says. "It's sickening." The new craze, based on an ancient game, promotes math skills. By RENEE STOVSKY St. Louis Post-Dispatch Crazy Bones, a new toy craze among kids, is based on an ancient game that involved sheep knuckle bones. Parents like this fad because it teaches math skills, is allowance-friendly and old-fashioned enough to play without computers or joysticks. It even promotes healthy social interaction. Dem bones. Funny Bone. Bone Jour. James Bone. If you’ve got kids between the ages of 5 and 13 and you haven’t heard those names bandied about yet, you’ve still got time to bone up on the latest toy craze before it hits home. Crazy Bones. Pocket-size pieces of colorful plastic with goofy faces and plenty of attitude that you can roll like dice, toss like jacks, flip like tiddlywinks, even bowl or shoot hoops with. But on a recent Friday night at a Zany Brainy store in St. Louis, most of the 160-plus kids who mobbed it for its weekly Crazy Bones night seemed intent on simply trading them or adding to their personal collections. that it would still not be a matter of manners. Etiquette being a social discipline, it kindly allows you to torture yourself as you like, provided you don’t scream at the dinner table or otherwise inconvenience those who are trying to eat in peace. There are other etiquette rules concerning the use of salt, however, and naturally, passions run high about them. Did you think etiquette was a sport for sissies? At issue now are the basic questions of whether salt should be placed on the dinner table at all, and if so, whether diners should be free to use it, and if so, when they can properly do so. On the one side are those who believe that it is a high insult to the cook to imagine that the food has not been properly salted when brought to the table. At present, there are 60 Crazy Bones characters that come in 90 colors, including prized glow-in-the-dark versions. (Do the math : That’s 540 potential collectibles. ) Also available: paraphernalia like plastic “coffins” to hold collections and bone “cages” to wear as pins or pendants. “I’ve got all the characters already, but I’ll trade for more Speedys or Goody Goodies,” said Sara Gardner, ll, a fifth-grader. “I’m interested in the sports series,” added her classmate, Cassie Nealon. “And I’m waiting for the new series — characters 61 through 120 — to come out.” The girls were sitting in a semi-circle around sales associate Cindy Scanlon, who was acting at the night’s emcee-auc-tioneer. As a Crazy Bones promotional film aired on a screen behind her, she repeated audience requests. “Mike wants to know if anyone has a blue Big Mouth he’s willing to trade,” she said. In the back of the store, meanwhile, a Crazy Bones tournament was under way. Selected players rolled five of the little toys across a table and counted up points according to how the pieces landed: face down, 0; face up, I; on its side, 2; standing up, 5. In the front of the store, another sales associate acted as Crazy Bones policeman, making sure the throngs of kids digging into a They believe that salt should not be made available to such people, and the most determined of them now leave it off the table entirely. More liberal cooks supply the temptation in the hope that no one will yield to it. Nearly everyone on the cooking side of the salt issue condemns anyone who salts food before tasting it. The culprits’ counter-arguments lack comparable passion. They happen to like food saltier than most, they plead, and so they are just in the habit of putting salt on food that everyone else would undoubtedly find salted to perfection. Or they weren’t paying attention. So they lose the argument. But Miss Manners notices that they lack something more important to the question of who wins: They lack the inten- barrel full of foil Crazy Bones envelopes — they come four to a $1.99 pack — didn’t pop the packages open as they squeezed the merchandise, trying to determine which characters were inside simply by feel. Sitting on a bench, sipping coffee and trying to make sense of the mayhem were neighbors Sandy Worthington and Jean Pfeiffer, whose daughters had talked them into coming to the evening’s activities. “I don’t get it,” Worthington said, shaking her head in amusement. “I just wish I’d thought it up first.” Actually, Crazy Bones is based on a children’s game, Astragal, purported to be popular in ancient Greece and Rome. It involved sheep knuckle bones (“astragalis” in Latin) that were cleaned, dried and decorated with painted faces, then thrown on the ground, where they would bounce crazily in games resembling jacks or marbles. Archaeologists have discovered 2,000-year-old pictures of children playing with such bones in the Greek city of Resina. Fast forward to the 1990s, when Spanish businessman Jose Maria Bella visited a museum with his children and stumbled upon an Astragal display. Intrigued, he created a molded plastic version of the game called Tabas that became a hit there. By 1996, Spain’s Magic tion to insult. Without that, they can be convicted of lacking taste, but not of the greater ot-fense of lacking manners. I he same cannot be said of people who peer into their guests plates and take offense when none was intended. Miss Manners rules that we leave the salt on the table ( in shakers for informal occasions and cellars for formal ones) and pass on to more challenging issues. Such as how to ban those horrid oversize pepper mills of which people make such a production. Address your etiquette questions to Miss Manners, Accent, The Orange County Register, P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, Calif. 92711. Her column appears in Accent on Sundays and Thursdays. Box International had introduced the game as GoGos throughout Europe — and sold $300 million in 30 months. That’s when Peter Gantner — purveyor of POGS, those milk-cap collectibles that were the rage in 1995 — discovered Crazy Bones. Gantner, 32, had imported POGS from Hawaii and sold $17 million worth on the mainland before the fad fizzled and he was left with a multimillion-dol-lar inventory. Gantner — who once made his living cutting trees — received a GoGos sample from a friend in Europe, and, so the story goes, dropped them on his desk and said, “Another hit. Thank you, God.” A slick guerrilla marketing campaign — including crisscrossing the country in Crazy Bones vans while doing demos in schools, Scout meetings, shopping malls and more — has already racked up sales of $3.5 million in 1998 and produced pockets of rabid Crazy Bones collectors nationwide. And unlike recent toy fads — think Tamagotchis, for example — this one seems to be endorsed by parents and teachers as well as kids. It (shhh!) teaches math skills, is allowance-friendly and is old-fashioned enough to play without computers or joysticks. It even (eek! ) promotes healthy social interaction. JUDITH MARTIN Miss Manners Toy fad Crazy Bones might be good tor kids Category:Blog posts